Beep the Meep

This month's Doctor Who Magazine, No 419, features my illustration of Beep the Meep from the Tom Baker Doctor Who Weekly strip 'The Star Beast' written by Pat Mills and John Wagner and drawn by Dave Gibbons. Tom Spilsbury (DWM editor) asked if I could do it in a Gibbons style (to which the answer is 'no') so I tried to at least make it a bit Gibbonsy.

Watch out Merlin!

The knife is sharpened for Merlin...

Looks like Random House have shelved plans for future Merlin adaptions. I only came onto the project for books 5 and 6 in the series which won't be published for another month or so, but had planned to work on books 7-10. It's a shame because I've enjoyed working on these books and as I've said before I think the approach that we've taken has real benefits for kids who are uneasy with chapter books.

Below are two more examples of how my hasty line work fits around a spread. I hope to modify this approach and use it with some of my own kids' fiction.

An action sequence from Merlin which mirrors the drama of series better than a single still image

These strips hopefully draw kids into the book, get the blood pumping, but you still need to read the text to get the full picture.

Don Quixote

These are a few sketches of Don Quixote I did this morning. I did them in Manga studio using a mid-tone ground and then working in a black layer and white layer on top. This is all for a pitch I was working on a while back that may yet have legs.

Something I rarely give myself time to do properly is design a character, I tend to work them out on the page as I go. Below is a page of designs I did earlier for Don Quixote. I really enjoyed the process and I've been allowing myself a another bash at the Don as a reward when I finish some of the less fun work I have on at the moment. That makes me sound like a drawaholic... which is probably true.

iComics and Mycomics

This weekend I finally got round to playing with the Mycomics app for the iPhone which allows you load a zip file of any comic strip you happen to have lying around on your computer onto your phone. It's very simple (you just drop the file into an application called Jivaro or use your internet browser). Something of a vanity project so far for me (I've loaded up my own Deep Hereafter comic done for Doctor Who Magazine), but it's handy to be able to show someone what you do at the drop of a hat. I've often been in the pub trying to describe a comic strip I've worked on wishing I could magic up the pages and just hand them over. Hey Presto!

A double click with your finger allows you to zoom into a panel, but clearly it's impossible to read an entire page at once.

Like any other sentient comic creators out there I'm very interested in the potential for comics in the new digital media. While most comic creators are salivating over the prospects on the iPad I'm still fascinated by the possibilities of comics on the iPhone. It seems to have been dismissed by many people already, the obvious objection being the size of the screen. The reasoning here is that comics are about seeing a number of panels on a page at once, therefore iPhone fails and iPad wins. Because the medium has to be tailored to suit comics, right? I'm not so sure. This may be the kind of thinking that has got comics into the mess they're in.

Most comics in sold in the past 20 years have been sold via specialist outlets to 'comic buyers'. For some this kind of niche, even if it grows ever smaller, is the ideal situation. I've never been comfortable with the idea and have always veered towards comics that sell in newsagents to 'anyone' (even kids!!!).

Once upon a time when comics were young they lived inside a parent publication called a newspaper, they were read by lots of people (and were frankly brilliant), they grew and like all kids found there own feet. But the good thing about their life in the newspaper was that everyone household had a newspaper and so every child had a comic, the genius of Windsor McCay, Cliff Sterret, E.C. Segar etc was exposed to everyone.

These days even newspapers are dying out, but there is a form of communication that everyone has, in fact that everyone carries with them everywhere - their phones. That's why it seems the obvious place for comics to seek a new home, to reacquaint themselves with the world. My son and his mates are forever swapping text gags, horrific youtube clips and bizarre information via phones in the playground. This should be the breeding ground for comics - in the grubby mitts and fervent imaginations of kids.

I'm sure the iPad offers enormous potential for comics to reinvent themselves, but there is also the possibility that the same people will be making comics for the same people, everyone preaching to the converted. The iPhone offers comics the first chance for reinvention and looking beyond the existing readership. There have been some efforts - including Lewis Trondheim who's seen the potential and produced the daily delight, Bludzee, Darkhorse have done pretty good job chopping up Hellboy and we have seen (God help us) motion comics, but too many comics people seemed to turn their backs on the biggest potential readership because it wouldn't 'look like comics anymore'. Is that really a bad thing...?

Mind the Gap!

Work in progress on page one of The Inverted Coma

Every freelancer's nightmare is approaching me - a gap in the schedule!! Best way to deal with this is to panic, start digging up old science fiction stories and draw frantically. Well, that's my way of coping. Since I found out I had a dreaded 'gap' approaching I've been drawing this page above in my spare time, if all else fails I'll send the finished story to people and hope to get some work. In the meantime I'm sending out old stuff like this:

Murderous Maths covers

I've done a few of these covers now (ten, I think) and worked on a full colour book with Kjartan, providing illustrations and strips throughout, Amazon says that book is out in April. I'm not the world's most natural cartoonist as my instinct is to 'draw' rather than 'cartoon'. That inconsistency runs through these images - cartoon schematics clashing with attempts at 'figurative' anatomy. It's a difficult balance to strike. There some very successful cartoonists/comic artists whose work has the feel of real people wearing cartoon masks which sometimes bothers me. Hergé of course solved this dichotomy with an even line weight throughout and of course delicately chosen and placed cartoon features.

I'll keep working on the cartooning because I have so much to learn and much of what I want to achieve with my writing involves cartooning well.

The Brush Tool

Baron Kazam returns!

Fitted in a new HUZZAH!!, you can go and see it here. One of the things that I gain from doing HUZZAH!! is that it gives me chance to experiment. On this occasion I decided to do the whole thing using the brush tool in Manga Studio on a light setting. Not an ideal drawing tool really and I wasn't happy with the finished page. I quite like these close up screen shots of the work in progress though. In a sense looking at these images at this size (click on them for full size!) it's like removing the illusion that these marks are real brush marks and instead showing the digital nature of the marks.

General Kvar

Durante

We need to fix a name for this giant blue baby of indeterminate sex. We can't keep calling him/her the Gestalt Heir.

Man Out Of Time (Zuda strip)

This is a strip I wrote and drew for Zuda, but I never quite finished it (page 6 is only half done). So anyway here it is for you all to read.

Actually, page six shows how organically these pages were made (I really don't like what there is of page six though). There was very little pencilling as I was drawing them straight into manga and keeping the improvisational feel to it. I had an idea of where it was all going, but I wanted to give it some the HUZZAH feeling of not knowing what was coming next.

More Merlin

I've been tearing through another Merlin book this last week. As I've said before the essence of these is all about speed and simplicity, combining heavy black with comic storytelling (that's Graphic Novel storytelling for those in the publishing business allergic to the term comics).

I tend to rough all these out whilst watching the DVD of the episode, occasionally pausing to take a screen shot, plot out a scene or compare the text of the book to the TV version. Then it's over to Manga Studio for 'ink don't think' approach.

The idea is to decorate the pages with dramatic storytelling that draws in early readers and retains the attention and focus without detracting from the text. Below are a few spreads from the past week that hopefully will do just that.

The Big Eye-Am

Here's another character from Dinlos, his name is Uriah Eye-Am and he's a young cyclops with a high opinion of himself. As you can see. This is from page one of the Big Eye-Am and will eventually be at the very beginning of the Dinlos book. The plan was to do the full page (there are three panels more to come in this installment), but I've run out of time with Merlin, Horrible Histories and various Soap characters all vying for my attention. Still, Dinlos inches ever forwards.

Vengeance of Voldar

And HUZZAH!! book two The Vengeance of Voldar is under way! Read the intro page for a summary of what went before or better still click on 'The Story So Far" and read the whole of 2009's HUZZAH.

These two creatures above are Ambulas, sort of giant frog-like modes of transport, poised to dive into the depths of Voldar in search of treasure. They've been 'borrowed' from a museum by a couple of Belamite Treasure Hunters eager to explore the newly uncovered Voldar. Along for the ride (kidnapped?) is the museum's curator, an elderly Bhahiri woman. I designed these ambulas during an experiment whereby I attempted to sit and draw whilst child minding. these are a couple of the sketches I produced. One just got lifted wholesale to the final art.I actually wrote two pages, but didn't have time to draw both. That's probably a good thing as it leaves what happens next more open for the next contributor.

And talking of contributors, we have a stella list this year. On top the usual crowd, Ian Culbard, Dave Taylor, Faz Choudhury, Colin Fawcett, Paul Harrison Davis, D'Israeli and me, there's PJ Holden, Si Fraser, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Geraint Ford and Sean Longcroft.

A few new HUZZAHers there. My advice from doing it last year would be - don't think about it, just jump in early, panic for a while and then work out what you will do. The longer it goes on the harder it gets to do your first HUZZAH. The most important thing about HUZZAH though is that the only person who knows what will happen is the artist who is doing the current HUZZAH, soon as it leaves their hand the next person to HUZZAH takes control.

Devil or Angel

Happy new year! And happy new HUZZAH!! Just put two new pages up on HUZZAH!!NOIR. It's been crawling along through the second half of 2009 but hopefully the next four months will see the story build at pace.

With Sleepy Jackson already established it's now the turn of his lost wife Rosalie (or is that Véronique). The best Noir Femme Fatales often have a checkered past and the same is true of Rosalie. I like the idea of her as being a total enigma - she could be either devil or angel. This is epitomised by mine and Ian's pictures of her from Chapter Two. In one she is a killer in the dark, in the other she is a nurse, a saviour in the light. We don't know which is the real Rosalie. We don't know who she is or why she's doing what she's doing. That makes her all the more interesting for me.